Building on the existing DDoS feature set in the company's popular application delivery controllers (ADCs), A10 today expands its offerings with the introduction of a standalone line of DDoS products for network-wide protection. The Thunder TPS product line is built upon A10's Advanced Core Operating System (ACOS) platform, which delivers up to 155Gbps of throughput, thereby helping enterprise and service provider customers address the increasing scale of DDoS attacks. Broad multi-vector attack detection capabilities are designed to secure customers' networks against a variety of attack types, while support for multiple deployment modes provides the flexibility needed to integrate with various customer network designs.

As businesses around the world grow increasingly reliant upon the uptime of Internet-connected services, there is corresponding growth in the nature, volume and sophistication of DDoS attacks by criminal syndicates and hackers looking to disrupt that service availability. Organizations face the threat of significant revenue loss and brand reputation damage from these DDoS attacks that have few good solutions today.

Legacy security solutions, such as firewalls and Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) have insufficient capacity to mitigate today's multi-vector DDoS attacks at scale. With DDoS mitigation capacity ranging from 38 Gbps to 155 Gbps (and up to 1.2 Tbps in a cluster) throughput, Thunder TPS is designed to provide protection against large attacks. Each Thunder TPS model is equipped with high-performance FPGA-based Flexible Traffic Acceleration (FTA) technology to detect and mitigate over 30 common attack vectors rapidly in hardware, without degrading the performance of the core system general purpose CPUs. More complex application layer (L7) attacks (HTTP, SSL, DNS etc.) are processed and detected by the latest Intel Xeon CPUs, so performance scaling is maintained by distributing multi-vector detection and mitigation functions across optimal system resources.

Thunder TPS is architected with an open design, which allows it to be readily deployed into a variety of existing network architectures and integrated with third-party attack detection systems. Thunder TPS supports flexible deployment models for in- and out-of-band operations, and routed or transparent operation modes. In addition, aXAPI, an open RESTful API, enables integration to custom or third-party detection solutions, allowing the Thunder TPS to take advantage of the growing ecosystem of multi-level threat protections solutions.

Supporting Quotes
A10 Networks
'DDoS attacks like SYN Flood and Fragmentation attacks are rapidly evolving to becoming a big numbers game, with malicious bots or zombie machines directing massive amounts of traffic in unison toward target victims. Effective DDoS solutions must be able to mitigate at equally massive scale and performance to prevent service interruption,' said Lee Chen, A10 CEO and founder. 'Service availability for Internet-connected applications is critical to our enterprise and service provider customers, so we are proud to help them improve the uptime and security of those applications.'
A10 Customers/Users
'As an early user of the Thunder TPS, we believe A10 is delivering a high-value product, with rich features and really great performance,' said Gerold Arheilger, CTO Xantaro Group. 'In order to sufficiently protect against large-scale, multi-vector DDoS attacks, mitigation solutions must provide very high packet-per-second processing power. Thunder TPS is built for these extreme environments.'
'The Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit and A10 Networks have a shared vision to protect the Internet from large-scale threats,' said Richard Boscovich, assistant general counsel, Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit. 'We will continue to partner to mitigate future threats leveraging DCU's expertise and A10's advanced threat protection technologies.' See Microsoft Digital Crime Unit's blog about how MS, the FBI, EC3 and A10 Networks stopped the recent 'ZeroAccess' botnet
A10 Partners
'GenieATM is a natural complement to A10's Thunder TPS for delivering network-wide DDoS protection,' said Popo Tseng, vice president of product marketing at Genie Networks. 'Customers will benefit from the interaction between the GenieATM Network Behavior Analysis solution and Thunder TPS' high-capacity DDoS mitigation, enhancing both the quality of threat intelligence and the availability of network services.'
'InMon is excited to be partnering with A10 to deliver real-time visibility and control solutions using our sFlow-RT analytics software. A10's support for the sFlow standard allows us to integrate detailed threat metrics from Thunder TPS with data from a wide range of physical and virtual switches, routers, hosts and applications to provide comprehensive visibility to operations teams. Integration with A10's RESTful API closes the loop and allows our controller software to automatically push actions when attacks are detected,' said Peter Phaal, president, InMon Corp.

'Lancope has long history in network security monitoring and detection. Combined with Thunder TPS from A10 Networks, customers would benefit from a comprehensive solution to detect and mitigate DDoS attacks to customer networks, ensuring network uptime and availability,' said Kerry Armistead, Lancope vice president of product marketing.

'Ixia partnered with A10 Networks to help validate Thunder TPS performance and its many DDoS mitigation options, verifying that it can operate at very high scale using our PerfectStorm security test solution,' said Fred Kost, vice president of security solutions marketing at Ixia. 'Since DDoS is a scale-based threat, it is critical that DDoS solutions have the ability to handle both high volume and sophisticated application attacks, protecting network infrastructure and application services from being overwhelmed.'
** Ixia and A10 will be demonstrating the performance and DDoS mitigation capabilities of A10's Thunder TPS, verified by Ixia's PerfectStorm at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and RSA in San Francisco.

'ThreatSTOP's Internet Defense Cloud gathers data about the currently active Criminal and Nation State command and control systems, and the Bots under their control, as well as improperly provisioned third party hosts that are abused to amplify attacks,' said ThreatSTOP CEO and Founder Tom Byrnes. 'This large and rapidly changing list of current malicious IP addresses and networks can be fully consumed and applied to traffic by A10 Networks TPS due to its capacity and throughput. This represents a game-changer in the ability to apply global network intelligence at all points, with near real-time updates.'
Models, Price and Availability
Prices begin at $195,995
Thunder 4435 TPS
38 Gbps
Single Xeon (10 cores)
16x10/1G ports
4435S model w/ SSL HW
Available: January 2014
Thunder 5435 TPS
77 Gbps
Single Xeon (10 cores)
16x10/1G + 4x40G (32x10G w/ breakout)
5435S model w/ SSL HW
Available: February 2014
Thunder 6435 TPS
155 Gbps
Dual Xeon (20 cores)
16x10/1G + 4x40G (32x10G w/ breakout)
6435S model w/ SSL HW
Available: February 2014
About A10 Networks
A10 Networks is a leader in application delivery networking, providing a range of high-performance application networking solutions that help organizations ensure that their data center applications and networks remain highly available, accelerated and secure. Founded in 2004, A10 Networks is based in San Jose, Calif., and serves customers globally with offices worldwide. For more information, visit: http://www.a10networks.com
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A10 Networks, A10 Thunder, vThunder, ACOS, aCloud, aFleX, aXAPI, aVCS, Virtual Chassis, SoftAX, and aFlow are trademarks or registered trademarks of A10 Networks, Inc. in the United States and other countries.